What is Natural Language Processing?

Natural language processing, or NLP, is how computers extract information from human language and, in turn, produce natural language output to communicate back. With algorithms that can identify and extract natural language rules, the unstructured data of language can be converted to a form computers can understand.

Natural language processing technology has been used for years in everyday programs such as spellcheck and Siri. But the applications of natural language processing are increasingly broad and profound as AI and machine learning become integral to more and more types of technology we use in our daily and business lives.

Why Does Natural Language Processing Matter to Customer Service?

Natural language processing is specifically critical to customer service as a component of automation efforts. For instance, a chatbot interacting with a human uses natural language processing to parse what the human is saying, link it to appropriate information, and provide answers back in the language and tone the human will understand.

As far back as 2017, VentureBeat reported that “Natural language processing is improving automated customer support,” and “creating customer experience (CX) that is more responsive, intelligent, versatile, and accurate.” Specifically, by leveraging automated conversational interfaces into customer experience ecosystems, natural language processing contributes to a positive experience for your customers.

How Helpshift Supports Natural Language Processing

While natural language processing is increasingly useful to customer experience, it’s also challenging because most AI engines have trouble classifying the intent of language in “short bursts.” Since customer exchanges are often short, succinct messages, this presents an obstacle for standard natural language processing algorithms. Helpshift’s AI algorithms, on the other hand, are specially designed to classify short text messages.

Helpshift’s natural language processing and AI capabilities are also tailored to fit specific use cases, with open and configurable models customers can customize. Helpshift offers turnkey models that simply work whenever you need them to. And Helpshift’s AI doesn’t require additional costs or professional services. Helpshift’s native AI algorithm continuously learns and improves in real time.

As natural language processing improves, automation will be capable of handling more and more types of customer service requests, and that will enable human agents to spend less and less time on mundate queries. Customer service organizations will be able to be more strategic in their use of human agents, while vastly improving the customer experience.